Brain Surgery (and Other PR Blog Jots)

Brain Surgery
Perkett PRsuasionChristine Perkett and Fred Han offer up one of the better responses I’ve seen to Jason Calcanis’ now infamous “fire your PR firm” post (including the point that he never actually said to fire your PR firm). They point to the biggest issue with Jason’s advice–even if PR could be a DIY project, who on Earth has the time for that? Let alone big CEOs. They relent that PR may not be brain surgery in terms of skills, it can take just as much time. “It is a combination of common sense, passion, intuition and awareness. (Just as some athletes play but don’t excel, not all PR practitioners possess these attributes.) It is also very much about time. The biggest problem with PR is that PR firms try to squeeze higher profit margins by pressuring executives to do as much as possible in as little time as possible – hence the off-target pitches and other seemingly “lazy” tactics. PR practitioners don’t take the time to read enough, relate enough or participate enough because of the pressures from clients and agency leaders around billable time.”

AMC Makes the Right Move
Social Media MarketingAs I reported earlier today in the Media Bullseye Editors’ Blog, AMC has decided to allow the Twitter accounts of its entire ensemble cast to go forward, despite not being the genius behind the idea. Scott Monty reacts to this, noting that while it’s great that AMC has made this decision, they really ought to have been the ones to come up with it in the first place. “At any point, a fan with less than enough restraint might do something “off-brand” and jeopardize how people think of the company or its products. And then there’s a problem. Which is why savvy marketers should be on the cutting edge of social media. If AMC had the foresight with which I had credited them, they would have been the ones who established these accounts. But the fact that their fans did so on their behalf shows how dedicated the fans are. To quash the effort just as it was getting off the ground was foolhardy.”

Speaking of Time..
Dave FleetI’m very big on tips and tricks to save time when sorting through dozens of unread posts in the feed reader or looking for a specific resource online. Dave Fleet has some tricks on how to maximize your use of both Google Reader and Delicious to cut down on search time when seeking out information. “If I want to search on one of the three topics I mentioned earlier, my first action is to go to Google Reader and plug the search in there. This searches all of my subscriptions, providing me with a highly personalized search engine. Nine times out of ten, I’ll find multiple articles on what I’m looking for on the first page or two of these results.”